Ditto! I don't hear that a lot about Double Dash, so I guess I'm on the right forum!

__________________"When you're in your twenties, you wonder what everyone's thinking of you. When you're in your thirties, you don't care what people think of you. And when you reach your forties, you find out no one was ever thinking of you in the first place."-Patton Oswalt

You can purchase Mario Kart 8 as packaged game, digital download, or as part of the Mario Kart 8 Wii U Deluxe Set bundle to qualify for the offer.

Wow. Thanks for posting. I read it wrong before thinking I had to buy the Wii u MK8 bundle to get the freebie. My daughter has been eyeing that Zelda game for a while so this kills 2 birds with one stone.

__________________
"Didn't you lose a lot of money on that other investment, the one from the email?"
"You know what Toby! When the son of the deposed King of Nigeria emails you directly asking for help, you help! His father ran the freaking country okay?!?!"
From The Office epsiode "Michael's Birthday".

Well, I come home from a business trip today to find Nintendo Land on my dresser... snapped in half. Seems there were a bunch of kids (5 and under) upstairs that got into the WiiU games and one of them broke it.

As kids do, none copped to it.

Grrrrr.

Nintendo's website says to go to your local retailer and purchase the game again.

my youngest broke my Wii U Super Mario 2 (whatever the 2D one is called where 4 players play at the same time) disk. Now, for the games my kids are mainly going to play, i just buy them from the online store so i dont have to worry.

The Wii U shipped 2.72 million consoles worldwide during Nintendo's last fiscal year. This is very close to their revised projections in January of 2.8 million consoles (down from their original estimate of 9 million). They're at 6.18 million consoles shipped since launch. Although the Wii U estimates in January were pretty much spot-on, the 3DS estimates were not. Hmmm.

They're anticipating sales of 3.6 million Wii U consoles this coming fiscal year. As low a number as that is, it still seems extremely ambitious given the limited slate of marquee draw software. At this point, it's hard to see how it'd be possible for the Wii U to ever match the GameCube's lifetime sales of around 21.7 million consoles.

The most popular games are pretty huge, though! New Super Mario Bros. U has moved 4.16 million copies. Super Mario 3D World cracked the 2 million mark, and New Super Luigi U isn't far behind. Surprisingly, Wii Party U is a million-plus seller. Wind Waker HD did really well at 1.22 million sales. These do include digital sales. The eShop (across 3DS and Wii U) had 50% growth year over year, which has to be exciting for Nintendo.

I'm sure at E3, we'll get a clearer picture of the rest of the year for the Wii U software-wise. Right now, the exclusive releases are looking like:

I suspect X will creep into 2015, at least in the U.S. Yarn Yoshi is anyone's guess. Hopefully this year. With as little as we've seen of Shin Megami Tensei X Fire Emblem, it's probably a 2015 release. Zelda U is almost certainly next year, if not 2016.

Nintendo said in the earnings report this morning that they "will seek to supply high quality games on a continuous basis", but there's no real sign of that for 2014, anyway, unless they have a very different definition of "continuous" than I do. Clearly there's not a lot coming in 2014 or very early 2015...otherwise, their projections would be higher.

Sales numbers like this ought to be inside baseball that's generally meaningless to me. I like plenty of movies that didn't do well at the box office, and potential sales obviously don't make a game more fun (at least for a primarily single player/local multiplayer person like myself). I'm more fixated on Nintendo's numbers because I'm worried about what this means for the future. Nintendo will have a really tough time rallying support for whatever's next. I'm worried that they might learn the wrong lessons from the Wii U's abysmal sales, something that could impact software going forward.

Aargh. Such a terrific console too.

__________________"When you're in your twenties, you wonder what everyone's thinking of you. When you're in your thirties, you don't care what people think of you. And when you reach your forties, you find out no one was ever thinking of you in the first place."-Patton Oswalt

The most popular games are pretty huge, though! New Super Mario Bros. U has moved 4.16 million copies. Super Mario 3D World cracked the 2 million mark, and New Super Luigi U isn't far behind. Surprisingly, Wii Party U is a million-plus seller. Wind Waker HD did really well at 1.22 million sales. These do include digital sales. The eShop (across 3DS and Wii U) had 50% growth year over year, which has to be exciting for Nintendo..

I have to assume those include bundle sales with hardware. All of those games above (except 3D World) have been bundled.

__________________"When you're in your twenties, you wonder what everyone's thinking of you. When you're in your thirties, you don't care what people think of you. And when you reach your forties, you find out no one was ever thinking of you in the first place."-Patton Oswalt

I'm worried that they might learn the wrong lessons from the Wii U's abysmal sales, something that could impact software going forward.

Aargh. Such a terrific console too.

If they could find a way to sell it at $199 w/ one of the Mario games, it would be a different ball game. But with their recent announcement, INCREASING the price by $30 and packing in Mario Kart is pretty telling that they have absolutely no idea what they are doing at this point. $70 difference between a Wii U and a PS4 is a no-brainer.

Nintendo made an annual operating loss for the third consecutive year in 2013, ending up ¥46.4 billion ($457 million) in the red as Wii U sales failed to pick up following the holiday season. The Kyoto company's net loss was ¥23.2 billion ($228 million). Total Wii U sales now stand at 6.17 million consoles worldwide, meaning that Nintendo sold just 310,000 in the quarter ended March 31st — a 20 percent drop on its performance a year ago.

Quote:

"Nintendo will focus on efforts that seek to stimulate the platform," the company said in its release, promising to expand Wii U sales "by providing software that takes advantage of the Wii U GamePad, utilizing its built-in functionality as an NFC reader/writer, and adding Nintendo DS Virtual Console titles to the Wii U software lineup."

I imagine Mario Kart should give a small boost in sales, but I agree that it's bundle bumping the cost up is a tough sell.

__________________"When you're in your twenties, you wonder what everyone's thinking of you. When you're in your thirties, you don't care what people think of you. And when you reach your forties, you find out no one was ever thinking of you in the first place."-Patton Oswalt

I've probably said this before, but when I was in 6th grade or something like that, my father started going to the gym and dragged me along with him. My second favorite thing (behind swimming!) was a rowing machine that had an Intellivision-grade game attached to it. As you rowed, your avatar would race across a lake or something like that. I loved that competitive element to it. Things like FitBit give you numbers that you can match/beat, kind of like a score, but more explicitly gamifying exercise... I don't know, if I didn't already have an unnecessarily high-end elliptical, I could absolutely see myself biting. The tricky thing is that for this to work well, there'd have to be dedicated hardware or standardized modules or something, and that's a big barrier to entry.

On the other hand, Iwata has said that:

Quote:

"I finally figured that ‘improving people’s quality of life with fun,’ with emphasis to the ‘fun’ would be perfect for Nintendo. And that’s when I decided to use this as a focus."

...so...maybe QoL isn't necessarily fitness-related? He's been so vague about it that who the hell knows?

__________________"When you're in your twenties, you wonder what everyone's thinking of you. When you're in your thirties, you don't care what people think of you. And when you reach your forties, you find out no one was ever thinking of you in the first place."-Patton Oswalt

I imagine Mario Kart should give a small boost in sales, but I agree that it's bundle bumping the cost up is a tough sell.

I'll probably get the Mario Kart Bundle (I already own the Zelda bundle) for my kids to play at college when I see it discounted under $300 or maybe bundled with second free game. I'm sure that Target/Best Buy/Newegg will have some promotion before the end of July that will stack with the free digital game from Nintendo.